This course will be splitted in two Parts.
Part I will take place from 22-24 of July and Part II will take place on 2-3 of September. Students will be required to hand in a research project by August 31.

Many economists spend much of their lives in front of a computer, analysing data or simulating economic models. Surprisingly few of them have ever been taught how to do this well.
Class exposure to programming languages is most often limited to mastering (Stata, Matlab, EViews, . . . ) just well enough in order to perform simple tasks like running a basic regression.
However, these skills do not scale up in a straightforward manner to handle complex projects such as a master's thesis, a research paper, or typical work in government or private business
settings. As a result, economists spend their time wrestling with software, instead of doing work, but have no idea how reliable or effcient their programs are.
This course is designed to help full in this gap. It is aimed at PhD students who expect to write their theses in a eld that requires modest to heavy use of computations. Examples
include applied microeconomics, econometrics, macroeconomics, computational economics - any field that either involves real-world data; or that does not generally lead to models with
simple closed-form solutions.
We will introduce students to programming methods that will substantially reduce their time spent programming while at the same time making their programs more dependable and their results reproducible without extra effort. The course draws extensively on some simple techniques that are the backbone of modern software development, which most economists are simply not aware of. It shows the usefulness of these techniques for a wide variety of economic and econometric applications by means of hands-on examples. More information can be found on http://www.wiwi.uni-bonn.de/gaudecker/teaching.html.